One of the (many) things I love about the work my colleagues and I do at the American Folklife Center is that so many of our collections help to contextualize and humanize moments in history, collections from other Library divisions, or elements of popular culture that we and so many others engage with every day. One of those moments came last fall, as I was pulling together a post on clowns. The file I had chosen as the final image for that post — a digital scan of an enormous woodcut circus poster titled “Five celebrated clowns attached to Sands, Nathans Co’s Circus” — is housed in the Library’s Prints and Photographs Division.
The image intrigued me – mostly because I wanted to know just who these celebrated clowns were. It did not appear that there were any details about their identity on the poster itself, so I reached out to Prints & Photographs through their Ask a Librarian feature to see if they could provide more information. Reference Specialist Ryan Brubacher shared that the poster came to the Library by way of an 1856 copyright deposit. He provided a scan of the handwritten registration notation in the New York Southern District copyright ledger, made when Joseph Morse deposited the item.
The poster, which measures around 8.5 feet by 11 feet, is the oldest surviving advertisement poster in the Prints and Photographs Division. Poor condition and inability to serve the fragile poster to researchers launched a multi-year, large-scale conservation treatment beginning in 2017. Afterwards, high resolution scans were made. Both the conservation process and the digitization of the poster ensured its continued survival and availability for research. Brubacher directed me to Susan Peckham, Senior Paper Conservator here at the Library, who supervised the many interns and other conservators involved in the treatment of the poster. She shared a copy of the examination and treatment report that she prepared before, during, and after conservation.
There was a major question that had kicked around in my mind since I first came across the digital scan: Just who were these “celebrated clowns” depicted in the woodblock print? Thankfully, the report answered that question. The report quotes an 1856 advertisement from the Weekly Democratic Standard, a southern Wisconsin newspaper, which identifies the clowns as:
“…Five clowns, witty, agile, grotesque, musical and mirthful. Mr. Sam Welser, Ben Huntington, Toney Bliss, Bob Connor, and Fred Denzor, have been engaged and will participate in all the performances.”
The report states: “the very large format suggests that the circus advertisement was designed for attachment to the side of a building or barn.” Interestingly, Peckham explained to me, “when posters like this were pasted up on barns, they were not meant to last. That’s why they were printed on thin, lower quality paper and considered ephemera. However, the paper used for this particular poster is remarkably good and strong.”
One benefit of the thinner paper used in the circus posters not meant for copyright deposit is that they would have been easier to manipulate during the billposting process. This was an important aspect, as I learned from an interview in the Center’s collections. While doing fieldwork for their Archie Green Fellowship project, “The Big Top Show Goes On,” Tanya Ducker Finchum and Juliana M. Nykolaiszyn interviewed longtime circus worker B.K. Silverlake. Born into a circus family, B.K. had filled many roles over her long career, including playing records for the circus acts, performing on the trapeze, and working in the cookhouse. One of these jobs was billposting when the circus moved to a new town. “Billposting,” she explained, “is putting up the posters in the store windows, different sizes. When I was little, we had huge, huge posters that went up with beautiful lions or tigers or elephants or the horses. The largest ones for putting in store windows was a one sheet, called a one-sheet.” Though she couldn’t remember the exact dimensions for those, B.K. assured Finchum and Nykolaiszyn “they were big, trust me. They were big.”
B.K. provided a lot of detail about the different types of posters the circus used, as well as the specifics around how they were posted [timestamp 48:20].
“Then you had posters that had some pictorials. They were called half-sheets, uprights, and then you had half-sheet flats. A half-sheet upright would be an extra large, but the shape of a regular writing paper If you were going to sit and write a letter, but big. Then a half-sheet flat would be if you turned it sideways and hung it. Then we had panels, which were long, narrow posters. Then we had date paper, which were the same things. You’d have the one-sheets, the half-sheet uprights, the half-sheet flats, and the panels.
Most of the time, on any major bill crew, there was also the cardboard posters. They’re just the cardboard ones, the smaller ones. Of course, back then, we had downtowns that were thriving and somebody would put those just downtown because they were smaller windows, usually, or you would lap over each other. If it was just a little window, you wouldn’t even go in with a big poster. I can remember very vividly, on the big posters, I had 125 every day to put out. You’d best put them up somewhere and that was ten of those gigantic ones and whatever the other figures they were, but it was horrible. [laughs] It really was. We probably had fifty of the half-sheet flats, fifty of the half-sheet uprights, and ten of the one-sheets. I remember there were ten of those. I remember that vividly.”
“Then, probably, the fifteen were the panels. Those went somewhere every day, in a window and at the top, and you carried sticks. I don’t know if they were one by ones, but they were long and on the end, you would put a piece of rubber and tape it so that you would take the poster and fold it over that stick. That was another horrible thing back then. We had a plastic thing that was actually a cigarette case, but they cut it. There were stickers about two inches by two inches, maybe something like that […] and you had to lick them and put them on the poster. Then you would fold that poster over, take the stick, put it clear up at the top of the window, and then – we had two sticks, actually. One with the rubber piece and one that was shaved flat, kind of pointed – or what you call that? Not pointed, but…kind of like a wedge. Then you’d rub those stickers down across, and that was billposting. What they do today is [gestures quick and careless], and I get upset when a billposter says, ‘Oh, they don’t want them in their windows.’ I said, ‘They didn’t want them in their windows when I was ten years old, either, but we put them in there.’ [laughs] And that’s the truth. They didn’t.”
“They also had what they called a tack hit, and that, if you could find a big enough, like somebody’s side of a barn or their garage, maybe the paint was chipping, you could spot them. So you’d go to the house and you’d say, ‘We’d like to staple some posters up here. We’ll give you a couple of free tickets to the circus.’ And those you would put up, they were called three-sheeters, or you had six-sheeters, I think that’s about right, all of them. But those would be like a collage – that’s not maybe right – but it would be where the poster was a big, beautiful scene of the circus, but it was in three sections. So you had to staple this one and match it for the pictures to look good, but when it was done it was huge. Then, of course, you’d put the date posters up either below or above or cover the whole thing if you could get away with it to make a real big splash.”
The “Five Celebrated Clowns” poster is the sort that would have been used for these tack hits. It was an incredibly labor-intensive part of billposting that involved slathering the posters with wallpaper paste, moving the pieces into place with sticks, and smoothing the whole thing down with a push broom. B.K. referred to this aspect of her work as “the artfulness of billposting.” Again, this would have been more difficult had the posters been printed on the same thicker paper as the version submitted for a copyright.
Although the Library’s copy of this large poster was never used in an actual tack hit, the work performed by the Library’s conservators echoes the care that circus workers like B.K. took when billposting for their shows. Library staff had to carefully scan each segment of the giant poster, cropping out the edges of the conservation lining tissue and creating a final digital image. Thankfully, the registration marks that billposters would have used to line up the poster sections could also be used by digitization specialists when they were piecing the digitized images back together.
Thinking about the work required to piece these sheets together on the sides of barns and warehouses made me think about the way the work of each of the Library’s divisions fit together while caring for the items in America’s library. Sometimes, the sheer size and scope of the Library’s collections can feel overwhelming. Often times, collections that come here are split up across different sections of the Library’s complex, depending on who is best able to care for a particular kind of item. As a result, a search for information about circus posters can take a researcher all over the Library. Over the course of researching this one poster, I came into contact with reference specialists, conservators and archivists from several different divisions. In the end, each of our divisions in the Library held a little segment of the story. With a little bit of work, we are able to fit each of these pieces together to reveal a fuller picture of this one little piece of history.
Further Reading
For more about the Library’s “Five celebrated clowns” poster — and many others! -_ check out these articles and blog posts by Library staff:
- “Hidden from Sight, a Giant Circus Poster Is Saved,” by Wendi Maloney
- “Pic of the Week: Caring for the Library’s Oldest Poster,” by Wendi Maloney
- “Step Right Up! Circus Posters for Your Viewing Pleasure,” by Jan Grenci and Shaunette Payne
Interested in more circus-related collections at the Library? Make a researcher appointment and check out these collections:
- Circus, carnival and rodeo poster collection in Prints & Photograph Division
- Microfilm issues of Circus Weekly in the Performing Arts Reading Room
- P.T. Barnum papers in the Manuscript Division
- Archie Hendon papers in the Manuscript Division